Editor’s Note: This article contains references to fictionalized representations of domestic violence.
BookTok is a semi-niche subcommunity grown out of TikTok. The members of the community often discuss contemporary literature, most often genre fiction with a healthy dose of romance. These books, from my initial and cursory examination, are the literary equivalent of Marvel movies — fun but vapid, heavily reliant on tropes, not particularly intellectually challenging and often appealing to our ancient, reptilian brains, casting aside deeper emotions for more primitive ones such as suspense, joy and lust. However, if these are books as bad as people make it seem, why are they so popular?
This series will catalog the major hits of BookTok, and the perfect place to start is with perhaps BookTok’s biggest success: the 2016 romance novel “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover. By most metrics, it’s a smash hit. It’s sold millions of copies and was adapted into a movie in 2024, starring and directed by Justin Baldoni and featuring Blake Lively, grossing almost $350 million worldwide.
However, if the movie, author and book can be described in one word, it would be controversial. Albeit, in a stupid way.
The film’s promotion was marred by middle-school-level drama, with fans commenting about how leads Baldoni and Lively do not follow each other on Instagram but Lively follows Hoover and other cast members, and how Justin Baldoni was absent from certain press events. Hoover is controversial for the subject matters of her book and her often-questionable tact when it comes to addressing said subjects. The book is controversial for its subject matter as well, but also because it sucks.
The good, bad and ugly:
This book is bad. It is just a fact. However, let’s start with some positives.
The book’s best part is easily its opening chapter — Hoover did a great job here; two strangers, both inexplicably on a rooftop overlooking Boston, talking about their lives. It is a very simple scene conceptually but it goes to very interesting places and does a great job hooking the reader.
Another good thing, or more of a backhanded compliment, is that its prose is so simplistic it didn’t take too long to finish; Hoover’s economical prose fleshes out minor characters and locations just enough for the reader to comprehend them but she’s never too indulgent in their descriptions.
Now for the bad: Most importantly, for a character-driven romance, neither any of the characters are complex, nor is the romance interesting. The characters are painfully simplistic, especially the three leads. Ryle is easily the most complex and still wouldn’t be an adequate side character in a better novel. He’s initially characterized as a laconic and erudite thirty-something with a big ego and a dark past, but in order for the plot to work after he slaps Lily, he has to abandon all complexity and intelligence, to morph into a one-note walking-red-flag abuse machine.
Lily is second in terms of character writing; she too is not very complex. Since she’s the point-of-view character we have access to her inner monologue, which should help flesh her out, highlighting her inner wants and desires; however, due to Hoover’s painfully sophomoric writing, her thoughts serve more as an exposition machine. She, by virtue of her lack of characterization, serves more as an audience surrogate than an actual character.
Finally, Atlas, whom I have met dogs with more complex personalities. Calling him one-note would be a compliment.
He’s a completely flawless person, and therefore he’s fundamentally an antihuman character. Simply put, he’s perfect to the point of boredom; written as being constitutionally incapable of doing any wrong, he’s kind but never overly genial, he’s protective over Lily but never controlling, and despite him having feelings for Lily while she’s dating and subsequently married to Ryle, he never acts on them. Flawed characters are not a bad thing — they’re the lifeblood of drama — and having one of the three main characters be a featureless blob of good characteristics is witless and disinteresting.
As for the romance, I didn’t find it all that interesting, but, I will admit, that could completely be a personal preference thing. I found it convincing but uninteresting. The sex scenes are rather gratuitous, and I am by no means a prude. However, for the aforementioned sex scenes to be meaningful, they should move the plot or impact the characters, and Hoover fails in this department. The book’s middle parts primarily consist of a series of events that allow for the characters, Lily and Ryle, to have lots of nondescript sex.
Helping neither the characterization nor the romance is Colleen Hoover’s seeming allergy to interesting prose.
John Williams — no, not the Star Wars guy — only wrote four novels and three collections of poetry during his entire lifetime, with 46 years of active writing. His works took so long because he composed his writing in his head, sculpting sentences over and over until he settled upon an iteration he liked. He’d write upwards of a single page if he was having a good day. This obsession with prose is why his widely-agreed-upon masterpiece “Stoner” is considered one of the greatest novels in American history.
Hoover, on the other hand, was first published in 2012 and has since released 24 books in a 12-year period. It can be inferred that Hoover probably doesn’t spend much time on a single page, let alone a whole novel.
Her prose can be considered, most charitably, utilitarian. There is nary a word above a middle-school reading level, yet even with a limited word bank, she is still able to construct sentences that are an affront to God and literature itself. Most famously in her book “Ugly Love”: “We both laugh at our son’s big balls.”
“It Ends with Us” doesn’t have anything quite that bad, but the dialogue does contain this overpowering aura of cringe that is patently millennial.
Now for the ugly. This book has come under lots of scrutiny and occasional condemnation for its portrayal of domestic abuse, with some people believing Hoover romanticizes it. While I see the arguments in favor of this interpretation of the book, I find this quasi-romanticization of domestic abuse a symptom of a deeper problem than the root cause. That deeper problem being Hoover’s previously mentioned atrocious writing. I think she had the intention to make a sobering and realistic depiction of intimate partner violence, but due to the myriad aforementioned problems with her writing, it came out rather oblique.
Junk food books:
My mother, who I would never criticize in my life — If you’re reading this, Mom, I love you — is an absolutely voracious reader. If she isn’t working or sleeping, odds are she has her nose in a book or her earbuds in listening to an audiobook.
I called her one day to discuss this series, and little did I know she had already read “It Ends with Us” and loved it.
Once I levied my problems with the book, she responded rather curtly with something along the lines of “Why does it matter? It’s a junk food book. It’s not meant to be another War and Peace.”
Dumbfounded, I had no response. It made me ask: Why am I being a Division 1 hater on something so many people enjoy?
I was considering whether or not I should even write this when I was rewatching my favorite YouTuber: Dan Olson, or Folding Ideas and his video series about the Fifty Shades of Grey books, which received similar criticism regarding its sexual content, objectionable depiction of abuse and much more, yet also has a militant fanbase of predominantly women.
Olson’s response to these similarities is better than anything I could potentially write, so I am going to directly quote him:
“Also we shouldn’t leave it merely implied, many people enjoy the pornography. They find the sexual dynamics and writing authentically erotic. That may seem unbelievable because the writing is so often just painful, but what do we benefit critically from pretending that no one could sincerely enjoy the material?
Conversely, simply because people enjoy it authentically, doesn’t mean that criticism of the material either in terms of technique or subject matter becomes invalid.”
I find that the same view still holds true here. Yes, it is enjoyed by millions of people. Yes, it is a junk food novel whose main goal isn’t to be the next great American novel. And yes, not only is it ok for people to indulge themselves occasionally, but it should be actively encouraged.
But no, none of that gives this novel a free pass from a critical examination of both its subject matter and technique.
In conclusion, “It Ends with Us” is a truly remarkable work. It’s the literary equivalent of a Big Mac. It’s not very substantial, fairly easy to consume and bewilderingly popular either because of or despite its manifest lack of quality. But after all, there’s a good reason Big Macs have sold billions — sometimes the people want some good trash.
This post was originally published on here
